MAPH Alumni Profiles, Updates, and Adventures

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If you live in Chicago, you may already know about next week’sLet’s Get Working: Chicago Celebrates Studs Terkel. The festival, which runs from May 9-11, will feature screenings, concerts, talks, art installations, talks, performances, oral histories–all celebrating the incomparable Studs Terkel.* There has been a lot of attention surrounding “Reinventing Radio – An Evening with Ira Glass” and the “Let’s Get Working” concert put on by The Hideout, the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, the Logan Center, and the Haymarket Brewery, but we have also compiled a list of other highlights in light of the sheer number of things going on (see below). You should check these out.

S.W. (Steven) Flores (MAPH ’10) has a story in thecurrent issue of Contrary that satirizes creative writing workshops at their less than optimum. Flores is a second-year MFA student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

His story is in no way reflective of the UW-Madison MFA, he says, which he “loves to death!”, or of workshops at Chicago, but the story may be influenced by some other workshops he’s experienced.

Film historian, writer, and filmmaker Stephen Tapert, who earned his M.A. from The University of Chicago in 2002 and later worked at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, is set to curate his first exhibition at the world’s largest film museum: The Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Turin, Italy. Continue reading →

Mutant Salon: Who Are Worth Our Love will present new sculpture, photo, video, performance, and collaborative works by Young Joon Kwak, in addition to offering attendees haircuts and other beauty treatments with Marvin Astorga & Elisa Harkins at Mutant Salon.

Download Marooned! with Matt & Bill, a new podcast by and for graduate students. It’s about graduate student life and all things academic. Features Bill Hutchison (MAPH ’12) and Matt Hauske (current MAPH preceptor). Free on iTunes – leave a review!

Last night, while leading eight current MAPH creative writers on an uphill March from the Seattle’s Washington State Convention Center to Von Trapp’s in Capitol Hill, I was marveling (aloud, perhaps unfortunately for my companions) about what going to the AWP conference can do for an aspiring writer. We were on our way to the second-ever MAPH/UChicago Alumni offsite reading at AWP. Earlier that morning, my colleague A-J Aronstein and I had stopped by a panel featuring the poet and teacher—and reader at last year’s offsite event—Shaindel Beers (MAPH ‘00) entitled the “Art of Difficulty.” Using beautiful language, Shaindel described teaching poetry students in prisons, schools, etc. as finding a way of “giving permission.” To write, one has to believe that they have something worth saying, a voice worth hearing. To Shaindel, it is a writing teacher’s job to nurture that belief, to create a space for it to thrive.

My experience in MAPH taught me the relevance of archival work and the way it breathes life into the arguments I want to make in my field. My MAPH internship made me a participant, a gatekeeper, in that archival work. As an intern in the Department of Special Collections at the Newberry Library, I have been working on the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad Collection. My internship coincided with the last few months of the multi-year project of processing this large collection. My primary responsibility was the processing and arrangement of correspondence between land agents, and various parties involved in land transactions. CB&Q land agents wrote to businessmen, firms that sold land to other individuals, lawyers, small businesses, and countless hopeful farmers. These thousands of letters all deal with land transactions, but they also track a living history. In reading and processing these letters, I have been able to form a picture of CB&Q’s part in American corporate growth, as well as the development of countless small towns across the United States.

“What makes you interested in transgender issues?” “So then, are you cis or are you trans?” As a woman perceived to be “cis” doing work that centers on issues faced by the transgender community, these are questions that I’m asked regularly. And, while they annoy me at times (okay, nearly allof the times), I understand their impetus. “Trans issues” are still viewed marginally, if at all, as serious problems in American society. Despite continued barriers to healthcare, housing, and legal resources as well as alarmingly high rates of suicide and drug use, America continues to casually misunderstand the term “transgender” and consequentially dismiss individuals who identify as such. Such dismissal has in turn created a dangerously prejudicial and at times outright violent environment in which trans folk are forced to live. Beyond all of this, I also realized first-hand in a recent medical advocacy training session that transgender persons are often unfortunately pushed to the outskirts of even the LGBTQ purview, as well. Continue reading →